The crew from Everything Caravan and Camping gave us an awesome article in the March magazine about insurance for your caravan.
You can read the article on the website or download the app and read it there.
However, it got us here at LLL headquarters thinking about how easy, or not so easy, it is to make sure that you do have the right caravan or boat insurance.
Particularly if you have made conversions to your van or vehicle.
We spoke to Nicola and Ian who are travelling Australia in a camper van about their experience.
We started by asking them about their experience in getting insurance.
Nicola said, “It was very difficult and we quickly found out it was not going to be possible to find an insurer that would cover a self-converted campervan”.
She said they knew exactly what they wanted, which was fully comprehensive for purchase price of our van ($6,500) plus the added value of our conversion from a seven seater people mover to a campervan which was around an additional $6,000.
In the end Nicola and Ian had to settle for less than they wanted.
Nicola said, “After numerous phone calls to different providers, the best we could get was to insure it as a van only, not a campervan”.
“The maximum value we could get was $8,000 and we were very adamant that the agent explicitly listed on the policy documents that the van contained a bed, fridge, cooking set up and the reason being we were nervous that not having this information disclosed on the policy documents could lead to a null and void policy in the event of a claim”.
Nicola and Ian said they were pretty disappointed with the process and most insurers could not assist them because the van was self-converted.
Overall though they say they would never not have insurance.
Nicola said while they would have liked to be able to fully insurance their vehicle they do have piece of mind that they are insured.
“At least we have some insurance, but we know that if anything catastrophic happens we will be out of pocket. A claim payout would not be sufficient for us to replicate what we have now”.
She said while it was hard to keep persevering they knew how important it was.
“At times it would have been all too easy to shrug our shoulders and say oh well. There may be an insurer out there who might cover self-converted vans however we had to draw the line during our search and settle at the option which we eventually went with”.